Game review: Duke Nukem Forever -- 3 out of 10

I will preface this review by admitting I did not finish it.

I pity anyone who did.

This game sucks. There’s no two ways about it. It should never have been released and should have been left to die.

The age of gaming where a Duke Nukem game is relevant is over. Back when gaming was in it’s Golden Age, you could pile on some dick jokes and some flimsy story about aliens invading Earth and it people would love it. More is now expected from games and their developers. This game requires you to suspend your disbelief at it’s crudeness and awful horribleness — and I doubt most gamers can do this for long.

Lets talk specifics.

Cons:

• A lot of the weapons are useless. For example, the weapon they start you with, the “AT Laser”, sucks. It fires at a weird rate and is weaker than a wet noodle.
  
  

  Pictured: realism

• The hair on each character looks like it was modeled with 5, maybe 6, polygons. Tops.
• The load times in this game are atrocious. So atrocious in fact, that I felt the need to (and did indeed) time them. After death, you have to wait at least 55 seconds to play again. One time I had to wait 1:20. When you are progressing to another part of a level (a-la Half Life series) and there is a loading screen, the average time is 2 whole minutes, with one instance being almost 2:30. In and of themselves, these times could be worse, but they’re made unbearable by one factor: THERE IS NO PROGRESS BAR. I’m sorry, but this is inexcusable. Every game in the past 10 years has had short enough load times (rendering progress bars unnecessary) or some kind of or some kind of load progress indication.
• Animations for Duke and other characters are not good. Duke’s jumping animation is laughable and the facial animations convey no emotion of characters whatsoever. See what I mean in this video.
  
  I read in the comments for this video (and similar videos) that this jump animation is an “homage” to the previous games. Probably not a great call since most players of a Duke Nukem game nowadays either a. aren’t going to remember a jump animation from 15 years ago or b. probably hadn’t been born yet.
• This game has some of the most macho pseudo-homoerotic dialogue I’ve ever heard in a game. This isn’t ass slaps at a baseball game, it’s lines like “Strap on the dildos, it’s time to tear up alien ass”. Said by a male. Lines Duke says often include a lot of literal talk about his own penis, or going up somebody or another’s ass. Now I’m not a homophobe, but Duke’s raging womanizing and heterosexual persona and his constant homoerotic one liners were kind of unsettling to hear together.
• The depth of field when doing the ‘rail sight’ style aiming is horrible. The amount of blurring on things that aren’t exactly where the gun is aiming is way exaggerated and you can’t see anything. For fighting groups of enemies, this is not helpful.
• The tips at the loading screens weren’t all terrible (some were actually kinda funny), but the one that says “Use melee attacks to conserve ammo” is just complete bullshit. Melee in this game is terrible and useless. Your enemies almost always melee you first and theirs is almost always stronger than yours — meaning if you try and ‘conserve ammo’ as the tip suggests, you’re going to die a lot. Plus, there’s not really a shortage of ammo.
• The crane part is directly ripped off of Half Life 2. The part where you get into the crane is almost a direct copy. No shame.

Pros:

• A lot of the props in the game are destructible. Barriers for cover, some buildings and the like can all be chipped away at with explosions.
• The game doesn’t hold your hand with waypoints or direction on where to go. Granted, the game is linear and it’s pretty easy to figure out where to go most of the time, but sometimes it isn’t and the game does a good job of making you figure that out sometimes.
• Puzzles in the game actually require something more than a pulse to solve. In particular, the puzzle inside the trailer with the power lines was actually pretty rewarding to solve.

If you were on the fence about whether or not to play this… I would probably suggest that you save your torrent ratio or (god forbid) your money for something worthwhile.

Let’s put it this way: if this game was reduced to $5 in a Steam sale, I would most definitely not buy it.

---

Posted by Thane on 23/07/11 04:18 PM
in game reviews, rants